Larchwood, IA

Larchwood began around 1872 when McLean County, Illinois land developers, including Jesse W. Fell, laid out a town in northwest Iowa. Fell was known for his love of trees, and in 1873 he personally supervised the planting of roughly 100,000 saplings and cuttings around the new settlement - a detail that gives the town's name a little more weight. Larchwood is now Lyon County's northwesternmost community, far from Des Moines, but the original idea still comes through: a planned prairie town softened by an ambitious tree-planting project. The local story is less about a dramatic boom than about people deciding what kind of landscape they wanted to build.